I enjoyed your post and agree with most of the points. I’ve also always told people to use Slack for ephemeral chat. There are very useful conversations that happen through Slack and improve efficiency of communication for my team.
Where your argument sort of falls apart is in enterprise environments. There are a few points to make here:
- The fewer tools for communication, the better. There’s a huge inertia factor when you’re trying to get an organization to start using a tool. SSO is huge in this regard.
and the really big one…
- I work at a company with ~4000 employees. Enterprise IT groups usually are supposed to find tech solutions that work for the entire company. If we were to pay Slack’s $6.67/month/user for the entire company, it would cost us over $320,000 per year to use Slack for chat. In my case, thankfully, we are a non-profit and get free Slack accounts.
another non-trivial point:
- We work on a lot of USG contracts that requires us to have physical control of the hardware hosting files that we share. We can’t do that with Slack (though we could with HipChat or Mattermost, etc.)
So, from my perspective, the first bullet is the real point/problem here. The third point also comes into play.
Discourse is much closer to also providing the features that make Slack useful than Slack is to providing the features that make Discourse useful.
Let’s say that I went to my IT group with a proposal to use one of these tools.
A) Slack. $320k/yr. No forum for perennial content. Email integration is shit. Files are stored off-site.
B) Discourse. Free (see below). Stores perennial content, Email integration is fantastic. Files are on site. No chat.
IT are wary of free things, so let’s say that you guys agreed to support/manage Discourse on site for 10% of the cost of Slack. The only argument against going with Discourse, then, would be the potential need for another tool to fill the chat gap. The company could provide the best of both worlds and save ~$290k annually.
Figure out some way to fill the chat gap and the choice between these two is extremely clear for enterprise customers.
Probably too late for a ninja edit, but here’s Slack’s forthcoming enterprise solution, which is even more expensive:
If the $32/user/month is correct, it actually would cost a company the size of mine $1,536,000/year to use Slack. Enterprises pay this type of money for garbage like Salesforce. I’m currently battling against Salesforce Chatter as a corporate chat platform. We pay millions/year to use it and it is freaking terrible.